The House at Cornell Tech

At completion in 2017, the tallest and largest Passive House building in the world: a 26-storey residential tower on Roosevelt Island, in the middle of New York. Mosart’s founders were among the certifying team.

The House is part of the Cornell Tech campus, 352 apartments for the students, staff and faculty of the university, with Handel Architects as designer. It answered the question that had hung over the standard for years: does Passivhaus hold at the height and density a city like New York actually builds at.

It does. The Passive House Institute in Darmstadt certified the building in 2017, and it has been reported to save in the order of 880 tonnes of CO2 a year against conventional construction. The lessons from a tower like this, the continuous airtightness layer, the ventilation strategy, the way overheating is controlled on a glazed high-rise, are the same ones that now travel into the multifamily towers being built to the standard on both sides of the Atlantic.